Could it really be the fastest 6 TB hard disk drive in the world? Seagate says its Enterprise Capacity 3.5-inch HDD v4 is not only the fastest but also an important step forward in scale-out data infrastructures serving up "supersize" and reliability to keep up with massive growth of both corporate and -based data centers.

That's a mouthful, but considering the explosion of big data it's probably a welcome sound in the ears of IT executives.

In the new product announcement, Scott Horn, Seagate vice president of marketing, used a statistic from market research firm IDC that is becoming familiar in big-data circles: Unstructured-data growth is doubling exponentially and is expected to reach 16 zettabytes of data by as early as 2017.

"This will cause cloud service providers to look for innovative ways to store more within an existing footprint while lowering operational costs," Horn said. "Seagate is poised to address this challenge by offering the fastest 6 TB enterprise capacity HDD based on our proven, reliable platform meeting this never-ending demand in both private and public cloud data centers."

Should Be Well Received

According to Seagate, the Enterprise Capacity 3.5 HDD v4 offers the fastest performance available for a nearline hard disk drive (HDD). That, the company said, results in faster data transfers because it's building on an eighth-generation platform that lets the drive deliver up to a 25 percent increase in performance over other 6 TB drives on the market.

Those specs work perfectly for 24x7 bulk data storage. And by leveraging the latest generation 12 Gb/s serial attached SCSI (SAS), Seagate said, the drive offers scalability for future-proofing systems. The company is also making the drive available in an enterprise-ready SATA 6 Gb/s interface, which it said paves the way for easier system integration.

Dave Reinsel, IDC's group vice president for storage and semiconductors, said cloud service providers across the globe are amassing terabytes of content each month and we expect this number to continue its aggressive growth in the coming year.

"With this immense appetite in mind and looking at cloud architecture's boundless demand for solid-performing and reliable drives -- reaching higher capacities, like Seagate did with its new, traditional 6 TB drive, should be well received by IT managers looking to meet their data center's soaring need for storage with the performance."

Seagate's Big Believers

Seagate said its new hybrid hard drives support the highest density storage per square foot in the industry, offering a 50 percent increase in capacity over the last generation (4 TB) nearline drive. The company called it "ideal" for both replicated and RAID environments, in part, because it has a lower total cost of operation for enterprise storage.

Wally Liaw, vice president of international sales at Supermicro, is a believer. He said
Supermicro's new TwinPro and range of SuperServer, SuperStorage solutions all feature integrated 12 Gb/s SAS 3.0 support, which makes possible full access to the maximum performance and capacity Seagate's new HDDs offer.